Design a Conversational AI Assistant
Company: OpenAI
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a large-scale conversational AI product similar to ChatGPT.
Users should be able to:
- start a new conversation,
- send prompts,
- receive streaming responses,
- continue multi-turn conversations,
- view chat history,
- regenerate an answer,
- optionally give feedback on responses.
The system should support millions of users, low-latency response streaming, high availability, abuse prevention, and safe content handling. Focus on the online serving architecture rather than training a foundation model from scratch.
Discuss:
- functional and non-functional requirements,
- APIs and core data model,
- high-level architecture,
- conversation memory and context-window management,
- model routing and inference serving,
- scaling, reliability, and cost control,
- security, privacy, and moderation.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design, distributed systems, and real-time inference-serving competencies for building large-scale conversational AI products within the System Design category.